“Could you recite it to me?” she asked John, eagerly brandishing the page toward him. “This prayer? Surely you know it?”
John had been standing immobile behind her, his watching gaze entirely unreadable, but he finally nodded, and began to speak. The words rolling from his mouth in the orcs’ unfamiliar black-tongue, the sounds rumbling from deep within his throat.
It was utterly foreign, and also inexplicably beautiful, and the sound of it, the sight of John speaking it with such ease, seemed to clutch something tight in Rosa’s belly. Distracting enough that she nearly forgot to follow along, but she belatedly did so, her eyes narrowing as she fought to match the words to the text.
“Your language is letter-based, andphonetic,” she said, once he’d finished. “Just like our common-tongue, and howintriguing, John. What is your name for it?”
He was still watching her warily, his gaze flicking down to the open book in her hands, and back to her face. “Aelakesh,” he said, and Rosa repeated the word aloud, feeling its unfamiliar weight on her tongue.Aelakesh. Not a primitive, illiterate black-tongue atall. Those damned sources had been wrong, unsurprisingly,again.
“And what does this prayer mean?” she asked, eyeing him, remembering that promise of his about answering her questions. And though she didn’t miss the tightness on his mouth, he sighed, and nodded.
“It asks for wisdom,” he said. “It begs for light, and learning, and truth. It calls for a wise Priest to rise up, and lead us with knowledge into the dark days to come.”
Oh. Rosa’s first thought, random and disjointed, was that she rather approved of this Ka-esh take on worshipping — but already the next thought was here, spilling from her mouth. “And who is your Priest? An eschatological figure? I mean” — she winced, catching the unmistakable confusion on John’s face — “a mystical future saviour, of sorts? A demigod, perhaps?”
John blinked, and then loudly scoffed, as though even the idea were thoroughly absurd. “Ach, no. The Priest is one of us. He is a wise Ka-esh orc, with the will and the strength to lead our kin into the light.”
Rosa considered that, her eyes studying that telltale blankness on his face. “And do you have a Priest now?”
“We do not,” John replied, voice curt. “Not since the death of my elder brother Fror, this winter past.”
There was a very faint inflection on this Fror’s name, as though he’d perhaps meant more than John wanted to allow, and Rosa’s gaze dropped back to her book. “Was Fror a good Priest? Did he fulfill the terms of this prayer?”
There was an instant’s stillness, and when Rosa glanced up again, John’s eyes were distant, a furrow between them. “He sought to. But he sought also to please, and to forsake change. To keep peace among his kin.”
Of course this damnably predictable orc would see that as a weakness, and Rosa felt her head tilt, her eyebrows rising. “And you wouldn’t? If you were in his place?”
“No,” John snapped back. “We orcs cannot afford not to learn and grow and change. We now face the dawning end of our kind. We must do all within our power to stave off ourdeath, before —”
He broke off with a grimace, clearly not meaning to betray so much, and Rosa’s churning thoughts flailed backwards, to Lord Kaspar, to that letter. We need to wipe out those savage bastards once and for all. Risking the resources and plans of the entire realm. Do not fail me…
Rosa swallowed, and abruptly turned away from him, back to the reassuring shelves of books. The next section seemed to be mostly records and archives, made up of carefully organized sheets of paper and vellum, and loose quires of varying sizes. They were all again written in this Aelakesh, but Rosa recognized enough to determine that many were birth and death records. Others looked more legal in nature, while still others were clearly technical, focused on what appeared to be mathematical and geographical content, much of it based around mining.
And next, to Rosa’s deepening fascination, were practical books. Cookbooks, and hunting books, and even books on warfare, with vivid illustrations of gruesome battle scenes, depicting both orcs and humans. And next was a large collection of medical volumes, anatomies and herbals and remedies, many of them with little annotations in the margins.
And then, surprisingly, was a small, eclectic collection of books incommon-tongue. Mostly more medical volumes, but also a variety of scientific and historical works, and even a few popular sagas.
“You said you didn’t have any human books here!” Rosa snapped over her shoulder toward John — though it felt difficult to muster up true anger, when one was faced with such delightful reading possibilities. “Youliedto me, so I would permit yourbook-thievingfrom my library!”
“I did not lie, orthieve,” John replied, with damnable coolness. “I said there was naught ofworthhere to read in common-tongue. I did not say I had no books at all.”
Rosa made a face at him, but still felt far too diverted to argue, and eagerly turned toward the next shelf, which was set slightly apart from the others. And when she carefully opened a little book with a badly broken binding, she heard herself gasp with pleasure, because this one was another orc book — but this time, instead of the already-familiar Aelakesh, it was written inOsadan. The language of the realm’s far west, and the lands past the ocean beyond.
And Rosa hadn’t atallconsidered that orcs might know how to speak other languages, let alone write an entirebookin Osadan. Or rather — she glanced at the shelf again, and tugged over a loose folio to peer at the script on the front — an entireshelfof it?!
And howwonderfulto finally be able to read one of the orcs’ own books — even if this one was only another cookbook. And as Rosa scanned through the pages of recipes, she felt her mouth twitching up, the delight bubbling in her throat.
“Pan-fried eel?” she read aloud, glancing at John’s dangerously blank face. “And dried moose-antlers? And squirrel-stew! Complete with boiled eyeball garnish! Truly, John?!”
She couldn’t help laughing, especially at the unmistakably perturbed look that had begun stealing across John’s face. “Garnish?” he repeated, his voice careful on the word. “What is this?”
Rosa explained, between lingering chuckles, showing him that particular line on the page — and as John blinked at it, his thick brows furrowing together in concentration, Rosa suddenly understood that he couldn’treadit. Not well, at least, so she promptly read aloud the entire recipe to him, translating into common-tongue as she went.
“… And, finally, season with much salt,” she read, “and eat this very good dish with great gusto, before your brother steals it from you.”
She shot John another amused smile, and for an odd, hanging moment, he didn’t reply, only blinked down at the page, and then at Rosa’s face. And then he glanced intently away, but not before she caught a very faint twitch at the corner of his mouth.
“This indeed seems a good meal,” he said. “I ken most orcs should eat it with gusto, before it is stolen. Most of all this —garnish.”
